


Her Vocation as a Woman

by Lilliburlero



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: Auntliness, Gen, Internalized Misogyny, Misogyny, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Period-Typical Sexism, Pre-Canon, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-29 02:02:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6354370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A twenty-one-year-old Hilary realises that at some point, she is going to have to talk to her parents about her future.</p><p>*</p><p>Content note: canon-typical levels of misogyny and sexism.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Vocation as a Woman

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/gifts).



> To naraht's prompt: 'Hilary Mansell: things you said through your teeth.'

‘Oh, hang, blow and blast,’ Hilary expostulated as the tea-gong sounded, stubbing out her cigarette in the pink lustre-ware ashtray ( _Picturesque Largs_ , memento of her great friend Edith’s brief and unlikely infatuation with _Kitsch_ ) and shutting it into the desk drawer. She flapped vainly at the air. It was no good: if she left the small mullioned porthole of a window open in her absence the wind would get up and stir her careful piles of notes into benighted chaos. She would just have to hope that Mother would attribute any tobacco odours clinging to her person to her having spent the grey morning in the library with Geoffrey. Her third brother’s company was deleterious to scholarship: he had occupied most of the time in anecdote, culminating in a curious story about a former partner in the firm he had just left (Geoff was taking a month off between appointments) who shortly before the War had bolted for the Continent accompanied by one of the footmen—or perhaps it was the under-butler—of the Member for Westbury, never to be seen again, everyone surmised, except then who should turn up but the under-butler or footman, with an air of speculative prosperity quite unlike the typical, timid client of Messrs Hill & Chapman, but unmistakably the same man. The clerk McCrea, infallible for a face, remembered the day, thirteen years before, on which he had come to the office in a tawdry, shiny blue suit and bowler, no doubt with extortion on his mind. Geoff, a fine mimic, dropped his chin to his sternum and rasped in a sepulchral Belfast accent, _it was all You. Pea. that day for The Quondam Mr Aitch_ , but at that moment their father entered and summoned Geoffrey to a sedate nine holes and luncheon, from which they would not be back in time for tea.

She snatched a silver-backed brush from its place on top of the chest of drawers and banged it through her newly-shingled hair. Consternation over _that_ had subsided, almost to the point at which Hilary might be persuaded to see some justice in her mother’s light-hearted observation that it brought out her distinct resemblance to the Crewe Lyceum’s pantomime scenery: a cyclorama design of a whey-faced Man in the Moon emerging tentatively through the heavy orange velvet tabs. Nor was she entirely certain of the success of her fawn tea-dress: the silk had looked subtly iridescent in the drapers, an urbane alternative to safe shades of green, but against her complexion faded, she suspected, to drab. The square, shirred neckline was undoubtedly flattering, though, even Mother had said so: _Oh, yes, it quite gives the illusion of a balanced figure, my dear. Now, if you’d only stand up straight—_

She reiterated the admonition as Hilary entered the drawing-room, adding, ‘—you haven’t the height to round your shoulders like the girls in the illustrated papers, though the allure of that posture continues to escape me.’ Hilary flushed and half-consciously assumed a robust hockey-playing stance; her sister-in-law Valerie grimaced quickly, in sympathy with whom Hilary was unsure. Sam looked up, blinking rapidly, from contemplation of his knees, which had begun to look exposed and faintly indecent in the way of schoolboys’ in their last months of short trousers. 

‘Hullo Val,’ Hilary said, ‘hullo Sam. Good afternoon, Mother.’ 

Mrs Mansell rang for tea; it arrived, she poured; Hilary handed sandwiches, cake and scones with assiduity. Valerie and her mother-in-law discussed recent talks given at their respective Women’s Institutes; they had both observed, and deprecated, a drift towards the forbidden subject of Politics under the pressure of the coal and export crises. Hilary found herself assenting to the opinion that it was such a pity to encourage contention when an organisation guided by a select group of competent, like-minded persons was so much more efficient. Wondering at the ease with which they had dismissed such fripperies as parliamentary democracy and trial by jury, Hilary turned to her nephew, who, having made hearty inroads upon the sandwiches, was solemnly demolishing a second slice of sponge cake. 

‘Sam, darling, I think that should be your last,’ his mother warned. He was, Hilary reflected, a rather podgy child. 

‘Oh, let him have one more if he likes, Valerie,’ Mrs Mansell countermanded. ‘A growing boy needs his food, don’t you, my brave little soldier?’ 

Hilary, who was young enough both to remember the exquisite mortification of Twelve and to forget how different is its scope of reference to that of Twenty-One, interposed hurriedly, ‘How _is_ the prison house, anyway?’ 

After a baffled moment, though, Sam caught on and grinned, swallowing the last of the cake. ‘The Head recites that one in Literature sometimes. I like the owl who has a cold better, though.’ 

‘The owl who has a—oh. I think it’s “was a-cold,” actually. Do you underst—’ then, realising that her curiosity about a headmaster who believed that ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ was suitable entertainment for pre-pubescent boys could not reasonably be slaked in this company, or probably at all, she corrected herself, ‘I mean, he must have a jolly good memory. It’s quite long.’ 

‘Mm. Some of the fellows get bored and flick bits of inky blotter and prick each other with their dividers and so on, which is a drag if the old bird cops it, because _then_ , of course, the lead-swing is up and it’s back to filthy parsing.’ 

‘Sam, my dear. Do _try_ to talk English in the drawing-room, won’t you?’ 

‘Sorrow, Ma. But Aunt Hilary understands. She isn’t such an antique as you and Grandmother.’ 

‘Samuel! Apologise to your—’ 

‘It’s all right, Valerie, I expect I do appear the complete Victorian fossil. You may get down, Sam, if you’d like to go and play in the garden.’ Hilary felt sharply the ancient injustice of her mother’s amused tolerance of insolence in boys; new and disquieting, however, was the recognition that she shared it. 

‘No thanks, Grandmother. I’m quite happy where I am. That sky’s rather dubious, don’t you think?’ 

‘Remember,’ said Valerie, very slowly and carefully smiling, ‘what Dr Lewis said about _exercise_.’ 

‘Golly, Ma.’ Sam got up; a small shower of cake-crumbs tumbled from his lap. ‘You’re as bad as the beaks. Chap could hope for a bit of a break from people being keen at him in the vacs, I think.’ 

‘Oh dear,’ Valerie sighed when he had departed. ‘I do worry.’ 

‘Tosh,’ Mrs Mansell said briskly. ‘All boys go through stages. Anthony was just the same.’ Hilary, though she had no memory of her eldest brother’s boyhood, couldn’t see how this could possibly be true of that stolid citizen of the world. ‘Are the masters happy with his work and games?’ 

‘ _Steady_ is the word they tend to use. _Thorough_.’ 

‘Well, then.’ 

‘But I don’t think they all see the—well, the slightly unsettling aspect. His housemaster said he wrote some skits for the school revue, which only the boys in the top form normally do, and while there was nothing precisely—well, the humour was a little unexpected. _Sophisticated_ , he said, and I don’t think he meant it flatteringly. And then, of course, there are the,’ she dropped her voice as if speaking of a terrible hereditary disease, ‘the _fireworks_.’ 

‘Oh, Valerie, you _will_ fret. It’s such a great pity you didn’t—I mean, perhaps you need more distractions. It won’t do him any good to have his mother hovering. Such fads never survive their first year at public school intact, anyway.’ 

‘I think Val means she might like him to make it to that point with all four limbs still in the conventional places,’ Hilary remarked. ‘But he’s really very careful. When we let off the Bouquet of Gerbs, last summer, the fuse was rather long—I was going to go back, and he very sensibly stopped me.’ 

‘That’s just like his father,’ Mrs Mansell said approvingly. ‘Where would we be without that capacity in men, to see what has to be done and do it at a moment of crisis? I’m sure I’ve never known a woman possess it.’ 

Hilary bristled. ‘Oh, Mother, _such_ nonsense. What about the VADs—’ 

‘It’s not,’ Valerie said, wearing an expression that to Hilary’s mind was rather more consciously Matthew 5:9 than it needed to be, ‘so much that I’m worried about him hurting himself, though that too. It’s the psychological side. What if it’s a sort of—fetish? A kind of—pyromania?’ 

‘Pyrotechnomania, surely,’ Hilary mused. The older women shot her oddly similar looks of dislike. 

‘He’ll grow out of it,’ Mrs Mansell said firmly, watching through the french window as her grandson disconsolately prodded with a bamboo cane the small, clogged fountain that she kept meaning to get the village odd-man to dismantle and break up for a rock-garden. ‘Ring for Nora to clear away, please, Hilary.’ 

‘I say,’ said Valerie, as Hilary returned to her seat, ‘I’d been saving this up to ask you. A friend of mine lent me the queerest book—I can’t remember what it’s called, but it was bound in green cloth. Anyway, it was about two women who visited Versailles, wandered off the main track on the way to the Petit Trianon, and then everything becomes terribly spooky and _shallow_ , sort of, and there’s a sinister man with a pocked face, and a tall dark handsome one, and a lady in a fichu bodice making a sketch—’ 

Hilary dug her nails into her palm and clenched her jaw, thinking of the rumours, the inexplicably charged atmospheres, the Humpty-Dumpty sense of precarious restoration, the crazy fault-lines that appeared and made sense only when one trod on them. She remembered coming up last term to find herself reassigned away from a sympathetic and soignée tutor to ‘dear old Gubbins,’ who resembled a glazed rock bun wrapped in gauze bandages; worst of all, the condescending and ribald diagnoses of the men: _folie à deux_ resulting from a morbid tribadism, naturally; _surely not, do you think those whiskery old halibuts had even worked out how to frot each other?_

‘—and when I gave it back, Moira said that it was quite universally known that they were two lady dons at Oxford, and I said she must be wrong, I couldn’t imagine any of them would be so silly, thinking how sensible and well-rounded you are. And we really did have a little bit of a row about it, so I thought I’d ask if you knew anything—’ 

Nora had come in with the trolley. 

‘I hope you didn’t have any money riding on it,’ Hilary said, despite everything enjoying her mother’s flinch at her brutally jaunty, billiard-room manner, ‘because I’m afraid Moira’s perfectly right. It would take all evening to tell you the ins and outs, but ‘Miss Lamont’ succeeded ‘Miss Morison’ as Principal, tried to install _her_ minion in her place when she retired, and all hell promptly broke loose until Lamont actually keeled over with an apoplexy.’ 

Mrs Mansell drew an audible breath. Nora uncharacteristically clattered spoons against saucers. Hilary continued, ‘They’d just set everything to rights the year I went up, but it’s rather a touchy subject, of which polite society does not speak.’ 

Valerie’s brown, beady eyes were wide and damp. ‘Goodness me. I thought people exaggerated rather, about the—well, you know, that sort of sense of living in a glasshouse. I expect you’ll be glad to do your finals and get back to normal life, won’t you?’ 

Hilary smiled tightly. She contemplated her mother’s noble profile, her soft, piled grey hair and high-necked ribboned blouse, her shoulders squared and lowered to the limit the muscles and tendons beneath the lace would allow. 

Upstairs, in the still-nicotinous ambience of Hilary’s bedroom, was a notebook with the same simple, futile calculations made over and over. Aunt Bertha’s legacy, safely invested for her by Geoffrey, plus her present yearly allowance of thirty pounds, amounted, however she worked it, to some twenty pounds less a year than the absolute minimum that she estimated (as it happened, under-estimated) she would need to train—presuming she got a place, of course, far from a certainty, remote from even a probability, she thought gloomily. Twenty pounds was not very much in the grand scheme of things, but then, ruefully, she remembered Mr Micawber. She would have to screw her courage to the sticking place and ask, and she would have to do it soon. Christ, she'd kill for a cigarette. 

‘I suppose so—there are people I’ll miss rather, all the same.’ 

‘And what will you do then?’ 

‘Oh,’ Hilary said through gritted teeth, ‘teach, I suppose. I suppose I’ll teach.’

**Author's Note:**

> Valerie has read [_An Adventure_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moberly%E2%80%93Jourdain_incident), by Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who were successive Principals of St Hugh's College, Oxford, in the years immediately before Mary Renault was an undergraduate there. 
> 
> Mr Micawber: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery." ( _David Copperfield_ , passim)


End file.
